This blog is a commentary on contemporary business, politics, economics, society, and culture, based on the values of Reason, Rational Self-Interest, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Its intellectual foundations are Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and the theory of the Austrian and British Classical schools of economics as expressed in the writings of Mises, Böhm-Bawerk, Menger, Ricardo, Smith, James and John Stuart Mill, Bastiat, and Hazlitt, and in my own writings.

The book consists of two parts. The first is my recently published article "An Open Letter to Warren Buffett on the Subject of Class Warfare," which is a critique of Buffett's views on the subjects of taxation and The Giving Pledge, as well as class warfare. The second part is a section of my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, titled "Correcting the Errors of Adam Smith: A Classical-Economics Based Critique of the Conceptual Framework of the Exploitation Theory." While a critique of the exploitation theory is present in the Buffett article, this part goes deeper and seeks to completely overturn the foundations of Buffett’s and most other people’s ideas concerning the relationship between profits and wages.

At least since the time of Adam Smith, it has been believed that profits, interest, and all other income that is not wages (or salaries) is a deduction from what is naturally and, by implication, rightfully, wages. This view is the starting point of the Marxian exploitation theory, which seeks to explain what determines the extent of this alleged deduction and finds the answer in a distorted version of the classical economists’ labor theory of value. But this same view is no less the starting point of the most important critic of the Marxian exploitation theory, namely, the great Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who differs from Marx in concluding that, because of time preference, profits (interest) are a justified deduction from what is originally all wages.

In opposition to Smith, Marx, Böhm-Bawerk, and all who share their ideas, the theory that I propound is that the original, primary form of income is not wages but, however ironically, profits. Developing the implications of this major finding and anticipating and answering the questions that come to mind in connection with it occupies a substantial portion of both parts of this book, but especially the second part, which is completely given over to this task. The most important of these implications is the demonstration of a harmony of the self-interests of wage earners and capitalists. This, in turn, has enormous implications for the way people view such major economic issues as capitalism versus socialism, economic freedom versus government controls, income and inheritance taxation, and labor and social legislation. This little book offers an unprecedentedly powerful defense of capitalism and economic freedom in the space of a comparatively few pages. It is offered as an introduction to the author’s major work Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, which is a state of the art defense of capitalism and economic freedom in virtually all of their aspects.